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Day: March 17, 2005

Flexbeta has a side by side review of K3b and NeroLinux. NeroLinux gets its ass handed to it by K3b. Checking out theDot’s comments on the story, one of the complains concerns K3b’s required integration with KDE.

sure, k3b needs 3rd party tools like cdrecord… but it would be nice to compile with qt-libs only instead with full kde-libs.

but that was not really the post that drives me nuts. This was a comment a little further down in the same thread:

if I look at opera, then I don’t think it can’t be done. for the kde-freaks everything looks the same from the theme side…
i have kde only installed because of k3b on my second machine. these are to many megabytes related for cd burning program with a gui.

So this person was running K3b (instead of one of the other half dozen Linux CD burning applications) and yet had the balls to tell the developers why they should have used a different tool-set than they choose to use. The specific example he sites is a great example of why KDE/Qt make for such a powerful desktop development environment. Opera has a dozen developers who a paid full-time to work on that web browser (and email suite.) KDE has 2/3 full time developers for Konqueror/Kontact. And KDE’s applications are actually BETTER.

Its my experience that the people who complain that xxx application stinks because it a) is linked to kde and not just Qt; or b) its linked to Qt and not gtk; have a problem that has nothing to do with Qt or kde. Did anyone read the comments from the article? The biggest complaint for K3b was that it wasn’t available on Windows. lol, like they don’t have enough CD burning software to choose from… If *nix had a couple dozen applications that were of the quality of K3b we would have lots more people switching… just to use OUR apps. The reality of the matter is that KDE is making that situation a reality faster than an other software “grouping” in the free software world. Why? Because the integration, flexibility, power, and ability to share functionality between applications means that we get great apps like K3b, Amarok, Kopete, and Kontact… faster than would be possible for any of these applications individually.

K3b went from basically not existing to being possibly the best CD burning software on ANY platform in a matter of a couple years. KDE (whither you like it or not) made that possible. And its time we start making sure that the rest of the free software world realizes it.